Welcome to the official wiki for MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), the sister project of MAME¹⁾. MESS is a source-available project which documents the hardware for a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles, and calculators through software emulation, as MAME does for arcade games. As a nice side effect to this documentation, MESS allows software and games for these hardware platforms to be run on modern PCs.

The goal of this wiki is to document how to use MESS, the technical architecture of MESS, and the systems emulated by MESS. If you want to help, register a user name and look at the pages already in the Wiki to get an idea how things are currently laid out here.

As of version 0.149, MESS supports 685 unique systems with 1,771 total system variations and is growing all the time (you can find a complete list of the supported systems here). However, not all of the systems in MESS are functional: check the specific driver pages to know the emulation status of your favorite machine in MESS.

If you have any questions or would like to contribute to MESS or the wiki, feel free to join us in the IRC channel #messdev on EFnet or at the MESS forum.

Current source code and binaries for MESS can be found on the MAME release page. Previous versions are available as well.

Artwork files for use with MESS can be downloaded at the MESS Artwork Project. Collections of cheat files for use with some systems emulated by MESS can be downloaded at Pugsy's Cheats. SysInfo, which contains details of the original machines and basic usage instructions, can be downloaded at ProjectMESS.

For completeness of information, you can also use MESSInfo.dat, which lists, for all systems and drivers, any changes present in “whatsnew” and SVN.

For information on external frontends to provide an optional alternative GUI to the MESS emulator, you can consult the MESS User's Manual.

Below, you can find some documents about MESS and its usage.

• MESS User's Manual
• MESS FAQ
• SysInfo.dat - miscellaneous info about systems emulated by MESS and usage instructions (generated by script)
• SysInfo.dat - miscellaneous info about systems emulated by MESS and usage instructions
• Compile MESS
• Usage (output of -showusage command)
• mess.ini Contents with Comments and Descriptions
• MAME Debugger Help -help Output (Debugger Commands and Their Usage)
• Software List Format, i.e. a brief guide to the XML format of MESS - “new” feature
• How To's
  • Run SDLMAME/SDLMESS on a Framebuffer Device
  • Create a CHD from a CD for Use in MESS Drivers (courtesy of The Guru)
  • Macintosh Driver Setup
    • Install Macintosh System 6
    • Install Mac OS 7.5.3
    • Create Large (4GB > x > 20 MB) Mac CHDs
    • Convert Mac CHDs Back and Forth into Other Formats
  • Use the Apollo Emulation
  • Unofficial MESS TI-99 Emulation Pages at ninerpedia

• How To's
  • Setup Eclipse for MESS
  • Add a Skeleton Driver to MESS
  • The MESS Driver Lifecycle
  • Artwork Explained
• Description of MAME and MESS Source Layout
• MAME Reference
  • cpunum_set_input_line()
  • cpunum_set_input_line_and_vector()
  • cpunum_set_input_line_vector()
  • cpunum_set_irq_callback()
  • logerror()
  • mame_rand()
  • popmessage()
• MESS Reference
  • SYSTEM_CONFIG
  • device_getinfo
• How MAME Works at the MAME DevWiki

• Formatting Syntax
• How To's
  • Upload Screenshots to the Wiki

• MESS Drivers - with systems, open bugs, BIOS & device info, emulation status and much more! (generated by script)
• SysInfo.dat - miscellaneous info about systems emulated by MESS and usage instructions (generated by script)
• SysInfo.dat - miscellaneous info about systems emulated by MESS and usage instructions
• Emulated systems (in progress)
• Datasheets - collection of datasheets for components used by systems emulated by MESS
• ProjectMESS - website displaying info and images about systems and games supported by MESS

The MESS Subversion Repository is now part of the baseline MAME subversion repository, and can be found at svn://dspnet.fr/mame/trunk where you can follow the development. If you want to contribute and help with coding, there is a general ToDo list on the Wiki.

If you'd simply like to follow along, you can view unofficial mirrors of the ongoing source commits at Dorando's MESS SVN History or Redump.net's MAME/MESS GIT Repository Browser, or monitor the wiki sidebar.

The tools needed to compile MESS can be downloaded from the Build Tools page. There is also an automatically updated page which lists current compile issues (generated by script).

For bleeding-edge 32-bit Windows builds for testing purposes, you can download unofficial binaries from BobZ's Automatic Windows SVN 32-Bit Builds.

• chdman
• castool
• imgtool

• mame_regtest
  • testing
  • config
  • results

• ti99_4x, geneve
  • TIImageTool, Java-based tool for working with TI disk images, also containing the serial bridge connector (requires RXTX library)

The goal of this project is to identify, acquire and dump the systems needed for emulation. The project strives to preserve all game consoles, handheld and computers (basically anything not found in an arcade). The MESS Dumping project parallels the work of the MAME Dumping Project. The project has a couple of different sub-pages:

• Dumping Project Overview
• Systems that need to be acquired and dumped (by major manufacturer)
• Systems and games need to be dumped that have been acquired
• Systems that need drivers in MESS, for which ROMs are known to be available
• Systems that are in MESS that have no, bad or partial dumps (generated by script)
• Games that need to be acquired and dumped
• How To:
  • Dump 2364 Mask ROMs
  • Dump a BIOS using DEBUG.COM
  • Dump the CD-i's BIOS Using a Null-Modem Cable

Some MESS contributors have set up personal user pages on this Wiki, where you can find info about their activities, their collections, WIPs and other stuff.

• Christopher Stone
• Curt Coder
• Duke
• incog
• Lord Nightmare
• mahlemiut
• Michael Zapf
• Wilbert Pol

• etabeta's playground
• inblog (incog's blog)
• Micko's WIP
• MooglyGuy's N64 Blog (archive)
• The MESSUI Place (Robbbert's site)

• MESS-Related Sites